General Links of Interest

Tuesday, July 04, 2017

The Socialist Precariat

Not a particularly good article, but I like it's introduction of the "precariat" -- part time conditional workers.

I grew up on a dairy farm where there were plenty of security concerns. My father tended to talk about the security of "union jobs" as the gold standard, however IBM in '78 was a place that seemed VERY secure to me and one didn't even have to put up with a union -- the idea of "seniority" vs pay for performance was always one of the things I hated most about the unions.

The fact is that even our next breath is ALWAYS precarious and not in our control. While we are all masters of rationalization, ANY idea of "security" outside of God is and always has been a fools errand. For tens of thousands of years, it was understood that the family, the church, and the immediate community were the closest thing possible to "security" in this life.

This of course does not fit well with state power and control. The state always seeks to become "god" -- either via a state religion, or by making the godless state to BE the religion as in BOistan. Today we have a criminal state over $20 trillion in debt with $130 trillion of unfunded liabilities on top of it that prints vast sums of money and tells us "there is no inflation". Sure, fake news and climate change are near gospel compared to that crock.

Never the less, for youth that have never experienced even the 20% stagflation of the late '70s, or even heard much first hand description of the last depression, the government "seems secure"? Why not just have the government guarentee us "everything" ... food, shelter, clothing, medical care, education ... possibly even enough guaranteed income for a little entertainment. Then we will all be "set with no worries" -- simple.

Here is the introduction to the "precariat".

"The “Bernie Bros” who made Sanders such a sudden and unlikely political force in 2016 were disproportionately young white voters who swelled the ranks of the precariat -- part-time, conditional workers. The numbers of such people is destined to grow with the emerging “gig economy” and the digitization of retail, which could cost millions of working-class jobs. Even university lecturers in Britain, notes the Guardian, fear that their jobs will be “Uber-ised,” a phenomena also seen at American universities.

For most Americans, the once promising “New Economy” has meant a descent, as one MIT economist recently put it, towards a precarious position usually associated with Third World countries. Even Silicon Valley has gone from one of the most egalitarian locales in the country to a highly unequal place where the working and middle class have, if anything, done worse (in terms of income) than before the tech boom."

The idea that the government can't fail is just one more of those wishful human dreams -- and so we are in a government bubble, and naturally, as in all bubbles, the biggest answer is MORE MORE MORE! (government in this case, however it could be stocks, tulip bulbs, houses, land, gold claims, etc ... bubbles are as much a part of human nature as the illusion we are "in control")

Government intervention has already drastically slowed the economy, raised the prices of everything (especially medical car), reduced the value of work, and come close to destroying the family, the church and the community. So it makes perfect sense that until the bubble bursts, more government is the obvious answer to EVERY problem!